have received a great deal of attention since then. This lack is felt
more keenly at the level of the study of bastardy across the Greek
world as a whole than at that of the study of bastardy in the single
city that is all too often identified with totality of ancient Greece:
classical Athens. There are a number of successful treatments of
bastardy in this city, of which Cynthia Patterson's article of 1990
deserves particular mention among more recent contributions, and
H. J. Wolff's article of 1944 among the older. But bastardy in
other parts and times of the Greek world has been relatively
neglected. When it is discussed, it is typically with the purpose of
elucidating the classical Athenian material. ⁴ The tendency of this
procedure is the construction of a monolithic, Athenocentric
Greek bastardy. Worse still, when scholars focusing on other
issues away from classical Athens feel they need exegesis on the
matter of bastardy, they tend to turn directly to classical Athens
for their answers: thus Lotze assumes that Spartan nothoi,
'bastards', are the children of two unmarried citizen parents on the
basis that children of such a category would have been termed
nothoi at Athens, but we shall see in Part II that it is highly un-
likely that the word bears this significance in a Spartan context. ⁵ It
is therefore particularly important for this book to give detailed
and focused scrutiny to the evidence for Greek bastardy outside
Athens, and to stress the differences in the bastardy practices of
other states.

It is, therefore, the main purpose of this book to provide a treat-
ment of the most important evidence available for the subject of
bastardy in the Greek world. Bastardy is an inherently complex
and messy subject, since it consists of a series of concepts and
practices that interface with and come under pressure from all the
social institutions mentioned above. The exercise is therefore
more centrifugal than centripetal.

The material is laid out in broadly chronological fashion,
moving from the archaic (Introduction, Parts I and II), through
the classical (Parts I, II, and III), to the hellenistic period (Parts

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